SkyTerra Podcast 1 SkyTerra’s Inception

Ross Jordan: Welcome to the SkyTerra podcast, where we are empowering your business to do more. I’m your host, Ross Jordan. Every other week, we’ll explore the world of technology, what has changed, how it might impact your business and why it matters to you. We will bring you interviews with business and industry leaders and discuss how technological advances impact your business and our lives.

Whether you’re a tech enthusiast, a professional in the field or just curious about the future, this podcast is for you. So grab your headphones and join us on this exciting journey into the world of technology. Let’s get started.

Welcome to today’s episode of the SkyTerra podcast. We’re thrilled to have a special guest with us today, Darren Schriever. Darren is a seasoned professional with extensive experience in the technology and business sectors. Darren’s also a partner and one of the two co-founders of SkyTerra Technologies, which was founded in 2015, where he leads SkyTerra’s technology infrastructure and engineering core.

A thoroughly detailed engineer with over 25 years of experience, he has worked in the fields of finance and education information technology as an administrator, a director and a manager for companies such as BlackBaud, NaviSite and Wellington Management. Darren is also an excellent and articulate communicator, offering clarity and simplification to engagements that are often complex and abstract.

An effective executive, Darren regularly and successfully guides teams on the importance of big-picture strategy all the way down to finite details for deployment. Darren is renowned for his ability to simplify the complex. In my own personal experience with Darren, in times of chaos, Darren finds a way to simplify, organize and unify resources to drive to the outcome they need.

In addition to his co-founding role at SkyTerra, as well as co-founder, board member and technical advisor at Skylytics Data, Darren also volunteers as a fire captain and EMT for Amherst Fire and Rescue in New Hampshire, a role he’s quite passionate about. He’s heavily involved with many community events and associations such as the 9/11 Memorial Stair Climb and the Amherst Fire Department Honor Guard, an honorary guard that pays tribute to fallen firefighters and their surviving family members in funerals and memorial services.

Darren is a sought-after speaker, an advisor and a leader for the business community in New England, and a very proud father, building a legacy as a leader, a volunteer and a businessman. Join us as we dive into a conversation with this dynamic leader, who is dedicated to driving innovation and helping businesses thrive in the digital age.

What I’d like to do is start off with some personal questions. Darren, tell me a little bit about how did you get here? You have a very interesting background that although it does have IT, it’s got so much more. How did you end up getting to the point where you said, “Hey, Dan, let’s start a company?”

Darren Schriever: Well, how far back do you want to go?

Ross Jordan: Well, tell me what you want. I mean, cause there’s a lot of story there. Everything from the bouncing. I love the watch story. You don’t have to share that if you don’t want to, but… 

Darren Schriever: I’ll tell [00:03:00] you what – let me start at the beginning of my IT experience, right?

My journey. And then I’ll fast forward to where it really matters. So let’s go back to mid to late 1990s. I was working at a bar outside of Fenway Park in Boston. And, quite honestly, I was having the time of my life. I wasn’t really thinking about being much of a grownup. I going through the early part of my 20s with not a whole lot of responsibility and that was fine by me, but I was also very tired.

So when you’re in that kind of lifestyle, it’s cool when you’re 20, 21, 22… you get to be 23, 24 and you very quickly start to age out. And, you know, it was after a very long night and after a very long Red Sox homestand, which is when, you know, we have like 15 days in a row where you have 400 people in the bar and it’s crazy. By the end, you’re burnt out.

So it was at the very end of that, that I’m at the back of the bar, just kind of cleaning up in a slow moment. And who walks in, but Dan Bergeron and his dad, who I’ve known since, you know, seventh grade. Through our conversation, Dan notices; he’s like, “You look like you’re done. Like you’re basically burnt out and just ready to be out of here.”

And I’m like, “Yeah, I need to get a real job and do real things and, you know, grow up.” And he says, “I’m working over at this startup downtown and I can get you in there.”

He asks if I know computers. And I’m like, “What’s a computer, right?” He says, that’s okay we’ll get you in and maybe you can answer phones and fill a soda machine and you can learn how to do the computers on the side.

So, flash forward a little bit. I get the job there and I am now a working professional for the first time in my life. And I was doing just that: answering the telephone and filling the soda machine. 

And, by the way, can you build these mailboxes for these users? Can you do this, that, and the other thing? I had no idea what any of it was at first, but interestingly enough, because of the type of activities they had me doing, I did something that a lot of people in it don’t do, which is I completely skipped the front end and user support and building desktops portion of my career: I went straight into working on servers and Exchange and infrastructure in the backend.

I took to it pretty well. Apparently technology was easier than I thought it would be for me. So I’ve always been a problem solver by nature. My father’s a mechanic and, in other avenues in my life, I’ve chosen problem-solving type hobbies. So, it really isn’t different when you think about it: It’s just systems. The more money is involved, and the more complex systems you get, it’s still just systems. 

So troubleshooting and problem solving and those kinds of skills are in that field. So I excelled earlier in my career. I did pretty well there. And I went through a couple of small dot com startups that blew up into very large dot com startups. Went public, went through an IPO and then the. dot com bubble burst. And I spent a year and a half building data centers all over America and a few in Europe. And then I spent the next six months closing down data centers all over America and in Europe. And I decided this was not the place for me anymore.

So I took my skills to a financial sector and worked for a hedge fund company. Dan and a few other friends of mine made our way over there and I spent the next decade of my life cutting my teeth and maturing as an IT resource, learning how to do things in the enterprise fashion; things that are resilient and scalable and reliable and bulletproof. To not cut corners. Basically I built my standards for what I still do today.

So as I translate to the cloud, the same principles still apply. So I learned all that, then after 10 years, there was burnout there, as most people do in that field. They ask a lot of you. 

So I decided to go back to the small company route and work closer to home. I was in Southern New Hampshire at the time and decided a small software startup is a good idea. I loved it. The company grew. Within six months, they’re going to be acquired. So that began the cycle of going to a cool company that just needed a little bit of work to get them right. They’re going to take off. You do all the work to get them perfect and they get acquired. So that happened a total of seven times in my career.

And sometimes you end up on top – you’re the buying company. And sometimes you’re the buyee and you have a job but don’t like the new company. And sometimes you don’t have a job because they already have someone who does what you do or four of you. So you move on. 

And what I noticed as I was getting older, the people who were starting these companies and building them and selling them off were riding off into the sunset and they were getting closer and closer to my age (and not because they were getting younger, right?)

I realized I wanted to be in that stage where I take my own shot at something and see where I can go with it. So I reached out to my personal network of IT friends and Dan was game. The timing wassn’t perfect, but you know, we’ll make it work. And we found a third who’s also willing to have a go at it. We’ll throw caution to the wind and see what happens. And that’s where SkyTerra was born. 

Ross Jordan: That’s amazing. 

Darren Schriever: So, the rest is history. 

Ross Jordan: There’s some real testing that comes in from starting a company. Did you have any idea what you were getting into or was it like, screw it, I’m done with everything else. Let’s just give this a whirl? 

Darren Schriever: I had no idea what I was getting myself into. I thought it took hard work. If you just worked hard enough, that’s all you needed.

Well, that’s one piece of the recipe, but it’s certainly not the whole thing. You have to have a lot of luck. You have to have some intuition. You have to make some good decisions by chance or by, or by just knowing what you’re doing. Then you have to make some hard calls along the way and do some things you don’t want to do for a period of time. You have to figure out what it is you’re really good at as an organization.

What I am good at is not necessarily perfectly aligned with what Skyterra is good at. Because, as an individual, I have a skillset. Skyterra as a company has this large eclectic skillset that supersedes anything I’ll ever do. So figuring out what we’re good at as an organization, as we grow has been one of the most rewarding, but also hardest, things we’ve done along the way.

Because it wouldn’t be what I would do. If I was a one-man company, we wouldn’t be doing what SkyTerra does. We’d be doing a subset of that, or maybe some of it, but I never would have thought or dreamed that we could have expanded and grown into what we are today, where the breadth of technology that we cover and our skillset is so broad collectively that we can probably tackle anything we put our minds to.

Ross Jordan: So following along with that breadth and scope: A lot of things happen to a company over the first decade, right? You guys have been through a lot. You’ve been through a pandemic. You’ve been through just the challenges of partnership, the challenges of employees… you’ve been through all of that.

What drives you? What, what keeps you here? Why do you keep wanting to do this? This is a battle every day. 

Darren Schriever: It is. They say success is rented; it’s not owned and rent is due every day. That’s pretty much how it is. Or sometimes I explain to my girlfriend that it feels like you’re swimming in a river: If you stop for just a second, it’s going to take you down. So you’ve got to give every day and all the time. 

What drives me is seeing what we’re building and seeing the organization, seeing the culture that we’ve built here more than anything else, more than the technology and more than the cool projects we do. Seeing the group of people that we’ve collected and built. I don’t want to be cheesy, but it’s family that we’ve built here out of nothing. When you think about it, there wasn’t a SkyTerra and now there is a SkyTerra. We conjured it up out of thin air like it’s second cousin to Harvey the rabbit, right?

We just made it and that’s really cool. Seeing what we’ve accomplished and things we thought maybe we couldn’t do when we did – even if it was a struggle at times – that’s what drives you to keep going because who knows what the ceiling is. 

Ross Jordan: Absolutely. You mentioned your team having come from another IT organization and having been engaged with you now for a few years. It’s amazing to me that the talent set that you guys have been able to acquire. You have some of the brightest in the business, some of the most talented in the business, some of the most overachieving in the business, and you’ve been able to bring them all under one roof. Nobody fights, nobody argues… there’s no contest of who has more acronyms behind their names.

What do you accredit to being able to take such high value talent and put them into one room and organize them towards a centralized goal? Because that’s what you’ve done. How do you do that?

Darren Schriever: I think it started for us with the core. They say your first hires are your most important hires. Before we started interviewing and recruiting like a normal company would, we dug into our network. We dug into our people. We knew the people we’ve worked with in the past, and we leaned really hard on those people who worked in those organizations that we thought did it the right way or raised resources the right way, that grew good IT technicians.

At some of our past companies, Dan and I were both part of what called the “A team,” meaning whenever something bad happened, it was always the same six, seven people at two o’clock in the morning on the phone. Somehow, no matter how many people are in the company, there’s always that same subset of people who figure stuff out and get it done; to solve problems.

We reached out to those people first. We recruited hard to get those kinds of resources to be the first ones we got. They were like-minded and it was an easy early expansion from that point of view.

We didn’t have to grow the culture. We brought in the culture we knew already existed from these people. So you get past year four or five, with 10 employees you can talk to everybody every day and Dan and I could be the ones to drive that corporate culture and make sure we were doing things the right way and staying on target.

Once you get past that, you have to lean on those people. To expand that culture and to be the ambassadors for the next person that comes in. And maybe you don’t get to talk to each person every day because when you’re 50 employees, you don’t get to talk to all your employees. But we have that core culture. Then we bring in people from the outside who we haven’t worked with, but we vet them out. We interview a lot of times when we bring people in; probably an excessive amount. We really try to figure out if they’re a good fit and if we’re a good fit for them.

People come here because they like the culture and they like the way we operate, the way we do business, not the business we do, but the way we do business. They like it to the point where they think it’s a good home for them. And then when they get in here and we’ve vetted out their technical skills, we know they’re A players in their own, right?

Well, you don’t get a lot of people who think they’re the King Bee. When they get into their very first project, they realize that everybody else here is just as strong as they are. That is a very humbling experience to somebody who thinks they’re the smartest guy in the room. 

I would never want to be the smartest person in the room. I worked very hard to surround myself with people who are smarter than I am. What that does is make everybody else raise their game. 

Ross Jordan: Absolutely. 

Darren Schriever: It’s a self self-sustaining kind of a cycle. 

Ross Jordan: So success isn’t an accident, right? You don’t just, as you said, wing it getting started and surround yourself with good employees. There are a lot of companies that have done that and not been able to make it. What do you attribute your success to? There just comes a point where you have to cross this precipice – it’s almost like all commit or it’s no commit.  

Darren Schriever: You know, a lot of companies have good success for a year or two or three, and they, they get something going and they can’t sustain it. They can’t take it to the next level. And that just pitters out, or they have some kind of epic failure or they grow too fast and implode or something happens like that.

Dan and I were at that point where we could have gone any of those routes and we made a conscious decision. to focus on execution. We wanted to focus on the work that we do and the relationships that we build. Do it right. Do good work. Do right by our customers. Do right by our employees. Treat people the right way. 

Then just have faith and patience that eventually it’ll turn into something better. And we’ve always just done that: head down, do your work, do a good job, do right by the customer, do right by your staff. And we’ve always said the money will come. Don’t worry about the money.

We don’t run this company as a dollars and cents organization. We never have. And we never will. You know, we’re doing things the right way. Do we have the right people we want to work with us? Do we like coming to work every day? 

We want not only us, but everybody that works with us to have that same kind of feeling. So I think that conscious decision to focus on execution and relationships that’s what got us from that fledgling company that may or may not make it, but it has a cool idea, to where we are today.

Ross Jordan: I’m on the business-building side of things at SkyTerra. You guys have to keep my promises, for lack of a better way of saying it. When I joined the organization, Dan said, “Just do what you have to do to make sure that client’s a client in a decade.” And when you think about that, you can’t just do what’s right today, you have to do what’s right for 10 years from now. You may not make money today, but you’re going to do the right thing. That’s a challenging place to be as a business owner, right? 

Darren Schriever: It is because that means at some point in your career, you’re probably saying, where’s my paycheck coming from? The money doesn’t come in right away. It takes a lot of time. Traction takes time. But at that same time, we focused on execution and relationships. 

Some people say they want to do A, B or C when they start a company. And then they realize they’re going to have to do the whole alphabet just to keep the lights on. And for a certain amount of time, that’s okay. You do what you’ve got to do over that period of time. You should be growing as an organization, focusing on what you do best – what you want to do best and let everything else go to the wayside. We decided we were really good at execution. 

Ross Jordan: When you look at the market as a whole, as a company, You’re not the only one in this niche market. There are a lot of managed service providers. There are a lot of people that have specializations. There’s a lot globally. It’s a very thick market with clients and competitors. How do you, as a founder, find yourself differentiating? How do you describe what you do so that you set yourself apart from the rest of your competition? 

Darren Schriever: Well, I won’t say we don’t have competitors, but what I say is we don’t necessarily compete.

If a customer is trying to shave every last penny, cut the check as small as they can and move on, I will tell them I know a lot of people I can have you work with, but it’s not us. We’re not that kind of company. We’re here to build a relationship with you. We’re here to be a long-term partner with you. And if that sounds like a good fit for you, if it resonates with you, then come work with us. If it does resonate with you, it buys us a lot of sticking power and it gets you through a couple of bumps at the beginning of the relationship.

If the client thinks that SkyTerra really has their best interests at heart and they’re really going to do right by them, then SkyTerra wouldn’t steer them wrong. Then, you know, maybe when some other MSP offers a cut rate by 5%, they stay with SkyTerra.

As partners, when we make that inevitable mistake, we don’t hide it. We put it up front and are transparent. We just work the problem and fix it. Then clients know they can trust us. That’s how we compete and win.

I tell people if they’re looking for that in a partner, then you’re talking to the right people. If you’re looking for next, next, finished, here’s your check, then that doesn’t get me out of bed in the morning. 

Ross Jordan: So you and Dan also had the vision to generate another company that works on a different side of IT, right?

Darren Schriever: We’re doing something that could compete with ourselves, but I think of it like plumbing: SkyTerra builds the pipes, the system and the valves. They build the controls.

They have this beautiful, well-engineered system that doesn’t leak and does what it’s supposed to. You get water when you want, you don’t get water when you don’t. That’s what SkyTerra does. The other venture we started deals with the water.

It’s a data company: Where we’re more infrastructure and controls and security and scalability and reliability, and they are data. How do you derive value out of the data that you have? Maybe you’re a customer that has a billion data points that you don’t have any idea how the heck you can generate a competitive advantage out of that data. That’s what we do. We figure out how to take the data you already have and find a competitive edge up or how to find efficiencies in that data. That’s really what the other company does. It really doesn’t compete with SkyTerra: We’re building the pipes and they’re dealing with the water. 

Ross Jordan: That’s a great analysis. When you look at the future of where SkyTerra is going to be five years from now, what do you do next? You’ve got a good foundation. We’re still growing the business. That’s not going to stop.  

Darren Schriever: The immediate future is easy to see. What’s right in front of you is very clear. The further away it gets, the fuzzier it gets. So what is SkyTerra doing next? We’re at this transition point. We have always said that we bake the concepts of security into the DNA of every single thing we do.

We’re always thinking security. Are we doing this the right way? Are we opening ourselves up to risk and those kinds of things? But we’ve never called ourselves a security company because we never wanted to jump that bridge. If we’re going to call ourselves a security company, we have to really be good. We have to be security experts. We that meant five, 10 years ago means something different than it does today. There used to be a security layer. Now the security is literally embedded into everything you do.

It’s so funny that the security sector has come to us rather than us going to them. When we say we baked security into the DNA of everything we do, well every single product in the world does now, right? 

We’re in a meeting or a leadership team and we said we have to stop saying that we’re not a security company. I think we are now. And it’s okay because not only are we, but we’re really good at it, too. We’ve been doing it for 10 years. We just haven’t been saying that we’re doing it. 

So, the next step for SkyTerra is to build it out and see where that goes.

We’re SOC, NOC, compliance, data governance, all these, all these buzzword terms you hear now that everybody wants to talk about all the time. Not only are we doing them, but we’re comfortable doing them because we have a really broad and deep skillset in all of these areas. So that’s what’s next for SkyTerra is developing that.

What comes after that? I don’t know. I’ll tell you five years is a long time in the world of the cloud. What we’ll be doing in five years is we will be executing well on a well-thought-out vision.

You know, if you look at our mission statement, we don’t use the word technology anywhere in it. At SkyTerra, we empower businesses through smarter solutions. That’s it. So who knows what technology we’re going to use? Who knows what sector it’s going to fall under? Who knows whether it’s security or whether it’s data governance or whether it’s something we haven’t even heard of yet. AI is totally taking over and we’ve got our fingers in that now, too. What comes next is less scary to me because I think our approach to what comes next is tried and true and is solid.

And we focus on execution. Whatever decisions we have in front of us, we do right by us and do right by our customers and everything will be fine in the long run. 

Ross Jordan: So you’ve addressed where you came from, where you started, how the company organized the employee base and how you manage that. We’ve talked a little bit about the customers, but let’s just take today as a snapshot: The customers cover a lot of industries. They have a lot of different compliance requirements. They have a lot of different needs and some of them are international, right?

They’re not all in your backyard. What do you see the cloud doing for SkyTerra as you move forward? Using the cloud may sound so easy, but it’s not. It’s ever-evolving. How do you deal with it? 

Darren Schriever: Well, it’s funny. We tell our clients all the time that the cloud is either the most or the least secure place you’ll ever put your data. It all depends on how you build it and what you do with it when you’re there. Microsoft doesn’t build anything that’s more or less secure than anybody else does.

They give you all the tools to build it as secure as you need it to be, but you can poke holes into it and make Swiss cheese out of it like anybody else can. A firewall is only as good as the rules you have in the firewall. Data governance is only as good as the policies you have in place that govern that data.

So it becomes less about the technology and the tools and where you are: It becomes more about how you approach it, how you think about it. We started with that core group of people who came from a mature business enterprise model. We all cut our teeth on compliance and security. We are all well-versed in that, so when you get hit with some new compliance standard you haven’t heard of before, it’s not completely foreign. It’s all just a different flavor of ice cream that you have to figure out how to make it work.

We’ve been successful at doing that because it’s the approach that matters more. Break it down to its most basic components: When there’s a list of things you must comply with, then how you comply with them is the art. Can you prove it? Can you provide evidence? Can you do it repeatedly? Can you do it passively? Does it require intervention or not? 

It used to be a lot more around policies that humans had to follow and technology that were tools that would help them follow those policies and enable them to do those things right now. Now it’s moving more towards passive compliance. You know, a user couldn’t do something wrong if they wanted to because the system just won’t allow because there’s eight different ways to Sunday that’s protecting that 1 and 0 on their computer. 

Ross Jordan: That’s interesting. That’s a great way of putting that, too. I might steal that from you.

So, I’ve had a couple instances recently where people have had challenges with security. Explain or help people understand: Although those were very unique situations from each other and very different ways that they were breached, in the review, as we got in and we started to see it, we identified quickly what had happened. If you’re a company listening to this for the first time, and you don’t know what to look for, where do you start in terms of a security roadmap? What are the questions they need to ask their IT team first?

Darren Schriever: Well, without talking about technology, just talking very broadly, do you have visibility? Do you have full visibility into your environment and your data?

Do you even understand what your data is? Like, if I said, “Tell me everything you have, show me everything you have,” can you even do that? A lot of companies don’t even understand or have a full visual of the scope of their environment. 

Ross Jordan: The proverbial pane of glass. 

Darren Schriever: Exactly. So maybe they have a lot of shadow IT going on. Maybe they have multiple completely separate organizations within the organization doing things where the left hand doesn’t talk to the right. So the first thing you have to tackle is visibility.

And one of the things that we do is we come in and try and paint that picture. 

They might say, “We’re in trouble. We’ve been compromised. We have something bad happening.” 

The first thing we want to do is, you know, figure out how big and bad it is. We’ve had clients say they have 200 systems out there and a dozen machines that are compromised. What do they do? 

The first thing we want to do is get eyes on it. And we usually find that they have like 730 machines out there, not 200. And they didn’t realize the magnitude of their own environment, never mind the scope of the problem.

So paint that big picture first. And then I tell people there is no such thing as secure or insecure. There is only more or less secure. So it’s a continuum that you move up and down the dial on. And our job is to be good stewards to our customers to improve their security posture. You will not catch me saying “you are now secure” to anybody ever. What I say is, “Your security posture is better than it was yesterday. And tomorrow will be better than it is today.” That’s what you move towards. 

There’s a term someone threw out to me many years ago: security exposure. You want your risk exposure to decrease asymptotically, which basically means ever decreasing to zero. Maybe never reaching zero, but we are ever approaching zero. It’s a compass heading, not a destination. We have to convince our customers that this is the way to go and to get them out of the mindset of “If I just do A, B and C, I’ll be secure.”

No, you will never be secure. You will be more secure. There will always be risk and we will always have to do the best we can to mitigate that risk through smart human policies, through smart technical policies, through the right software and the right tools at the right time in the right people’s hands.

Ross Jordan: Absolutely. So, so start with the visibility, where do they go from there? 

Darren Schriever: Once you paint that picture, how do you get control of the situation? So think of it like, the fire department work I do in my second life. Scene size-up is the very first thing you do. What’s really happening here? Let’s say you get a 911 call because someone’s got a broken leg. Okay. You get there. You do a scene size-up. What really happened is 35 people got into a giant brawl. That person’s on the ground cut with a broken leg, and there’s 15 people over there really angrily looking at me, not wanting me to help.

So that’s the situation, not the person with the broken leg. So first thing you do is that size-up. And then you figure out whatever that most important next step is. Is it to get the endpoints on the control?

Is that your biggest exposure? Do you have to get agents in all your environment to get the report to a central console? So you can paint that picture. When we say visibility, what we mean is, for example, let’s put the defender for endpoints on all your endpoints because that will start telling us the big picture. These machines and reporting issues are only part of it. What you really want to know is it’s moving in this direction. It’s evolving. I

And then, after that entry point, do you have to tackle email first? Do you have to tackle the endpoints first? So once you get that, once you paint that picture, you have that full visibility of what’s going on, then you can make an informed decision as to what to do next. And it’s different every time.

Ross Jordan: The scene size-up makes a lot of sense. This last year, we’ve had a lot going on with artificial intelligence, right? Some people may still be trying to understand the impact AI tools will have on their organization. Thinking of it from an executive level, what does an organization need to put in place to protect themselves from what AI could do if they didn’t know?

What do they not know that they need to know? 

Darren Schriever: Well, one thing some people don’t know is that just about everything you put into a chat engine is data for the world to consume now. So if you’re out there and you open GPT engine, it’s going to inform that machine and is going to be there for the next person.

So if you put proprietary data out there, if you say, “Hey, I need you to rewrite this proposal for me.” And you’re putting data in there that you wouldn’t want to just post on the internet while you just posted it on the internet. So you want to make sure that you’re not doing that.

You understand that that’s the world you’re living in now. AI is a tool in the toolbox. It’s not something to be feared. It’s not something to be ignored. It’s not something to be just widely adopted either. It’s something to be used when it makes sense. Like a tool, you know, when you have a nail that you want to put into a board, you go grab a hammer, you don’t grab a screwdriver.

It’s just a tool at your disposal. If you use it properly, and if you wield it properly, you will get great results from it. If you do it haphazardly, you will get poor results from it. 

Microsoft has a really cool way of handling with Copilot. So if you have particular license and you’re logged into Microsoft Edge, you’re using their license and their browser, and you use their chat engine, that data is private. It never leaves your organization. It’s very, very important that you know that. I still tell people don’t 100 percent trust anything because it’s AI, but you can trust it more. Rather than going to ChatGPT, you’re going to use Bing chat.

And because you’re logged in with your corporate account, it knows that that data can’t go anywhere. It won’t inform that learning machine and it won’t tell the whole world what’s going on there. So that’s one way to handle it, one way to keep it in check. And the other thing is, you know, encourage your teams to use it, but encourage them to use it responsibly.

One thing that people use AI and chat engines for a lot is scripting. It’s one of the bigger uses out there – to write technical scripts. How do I PowerShell this? How do I bash this? I see a lot of people just using those answers blindly. So they’re asking questions outside of their bailiwick.

They don’t know what they’re talking about to begin with. And when it gives them an answer, you have no idea if it’s the right or the wrong answer. You just see code and you try it. Well, that’s very dangerous. What I encourage people to do is know what you’re talking about. 

Ask a better question, like I’m trying to do A, B and C. How do I make this particular function get this particular result? Ask those very specific questions. And then when you get the answer, make sure you understand what the heck it’s telling you. 

Don’t just take it blindly on faith. If you don’t understand why it did something, look it up. It’s not a quick fix. It’s not a quick answer and run. It’s a tool that you can use to help get you over a roadblock or a stop. 

Let’s say you can’t get something to parse properly. You ask Bing chat and it gives you a great answer, because you know what you’re doing already, you’re just stuck at a certain point.

Half the time, I’m on the phone with one of my engineers – and I don’t do as much engineering as I used to – but I’ll encourage them to take that route. Let’s go to the bank and see what happens. And we’ll go there and we’ll ask a really good question and they’ll give us a cool answer.

And we’ll be like, “Wow, that makes total sense” because I know what I’m talking about. I know the language I’m working in. It just gave me something maybe my brain hadn’t used in 10 years or filled the gap for me. 

That’s how you use AI as a positive tool for change, as opposed to making it a crutch that could potentially make your resources weaker and weaker by just having it do all your work for you and not knowing what the heck it’s doing.

Ross Jordan: Yeah, there’s something to be said about not just applying that code, but understanding how that code will affect or impact other systems within the organization. So you spent almost an hour with me, and thank you very much for that. But I’m going to close with a question that I find interesting because nobody answers it the same.

But what do you like about running SkyTerra? 

Darren Schriever: What I like most about running SkyTerra is when somebody I’m talking to – maybe I’m working with a resource and that person is not really up to my level – on something and through just constant, regular relationship building and working with them through projects you get to that certain point where you realize they make a comment on a phone call with a client or they turn it into a piece of work or they do something and you realize they’ve surpassed me, like better than me.

I love that. I love nothing better than having a whole bunch of people who when they come in, they’re on level “X,” by the time they’re done with you, you see that growth. To see everybody find excitement and interest in what we’re doing here. And they actually like what they’re doing. And then you see them just gobbling up knowledge, like it’s vitamins and they love it. They grow and they grow past you and they exceed you. That’s what I like.

Ross Jordan: That’s cool. That’s a really, really good… 

Darren Schriever: Cause I’ll tell you why. You know what the flip side is Ross?

What keeps me up at night is that it’s all on me. If I ever feel like it’s all on me, that’s what keeps you up at night. When you feel like you have a strong team surrounding you that you know, that you can count on and that collectively we can accomplish anything we put our minds to, I sleep like a baby.

Ross Jordan: Yeah, that’s brilliant. Well, I have gone through most of the questions that I wanted to address today. I’ve already identified a few things I want to go back and talk to Dan about further.

I may come back and spend a little bit more time with you. I can’t thank you enough. It’s one of the things that I’ve always enjoyed doing, and some people call it salesmanship. Some people call it business development. You can call it whatever you want. But the truth is, what I’ve always enjoyed is hearing what makes people tick, what makes people work.

And it’s interesting: You and Dan having the relationship you have had for decades and decades and decades and even working together, how you guys look at things completely differently. You know how they say opposites attract, right? It’s, it’s interesting what you guys find in the success of what you’ve built.

You look at it differently. You see it differently, but it’s the same building you guys work from. 

Darren Schriever: Yeah. 

Ross Jordan: It’ll be interesting to help tell that story through these podcasts. 

Darren Schriever: So when people say, “Why’d you start SkyTerra?” Well, here’s my answer, and if you want the other answer, go talk to Dan and find out why we started there. Because we have very different drivers and very different reasons and goals and everything. But at the same time, what we want is the same outcome. What we differ on is how we want to get there.

Ross Jordan: Yeah. 

Darren Schriever: Where we ultimately want to go… like I said, everything’s a compass heading. We have the same compass heading. We’re just starting from different places and we’re taking different paths, but we all want the same thing at the end of the day. 

Ross Jordan: It’s interesting because it’s working and I love that.Thank you so much for letting me do this with you. Thank you for your time today. We appreciate you listening to the SkyTerra Technologies podcast. For further information, you can find us on LinkedIn or at www.skyterratech.com. Have a great day.